What’s Passive Income? It’s Not What Influencers Say It Is. (Published 2023) (2024)

Luca Alboretti was enticed by the thought of making money in his sleep.

He was looking to supplement his income as a real estate agent in 2018 when he created an online store selling golf products, an idea he had hatched after watching a YouTube video about how to earn $150,000 a year in “passive” income selling salt and pepper shakers online.

“I thought I would wake up to a couple of hundred orders, fulfill them and collect my profit,” said Mr. Alboretti, 28, who lives in northern New Jersey.

He spent about $5,000 on sourcing and testing the golf products, developing a private-label product and paying website management fees. He put in about 10 hours setting up his online store, writing descriptions for each item, communicating with suppliers and marketing his site.

Yet a year later, Mr. Alboretti had made only $300 in sales. He closed the store and began using the Instagram page he had created for it to share humorous real estate content he made instead. “I worked hard to get my couple of hundred followers and didn’t want them to go to waste,” he said.

That morphed into ActuallyAgents, a multiplatform social media brand that is known for its clever memes on Instagram and free educational resources for real estate professionals and lead generation services for brokers in the United States and Britain.

ActuallyAgents has become Mr. Alboretti’s full-time job. “The courses, videos and social media content don’t create themselves,” he said. “None of this is passive.”